Monthly Archives: July 2012

Brother Sam singleton is putting on a show in Maumee, OH on the 1st. But on the 31st he will be meeting with us.

Roger Scott “RoSco” Jackson, the creator and actor behind Brother Sam Singleton will be visiting Michigan for one evening only. Michigan Skeptics has the honor of hosting a dinner with the famous “Atheist Evangelist”. On the 1sy he will be putting on a show in Maumee, OH, but on the 31st he will be having dinner with us.

This is a last-minute event so if you can, please try to make it out. It’s a rare event to meet a national entertainer so intimately. This will be a casual, informal event to gather and meet RoSco in a way that not many else can.

If you are not familiar with RoSco Jackson or Brother Sam, check out our post about him from June.

Come and join us for lively discussion, drinks, dinner and debate! This is a good event for Skeptics of Michigan to come together and discuss local, national, worldwide items affecting skeptics. All are welcome to listen and take part.

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the emergency Session of Parliament. They recently, by act of Parliament, overturned a court ruling that effectively banned circumcision for the city of Cologne.

On May 7th, Cologne, Germany completely banned circumcision in the entire city for patients not old enough to decide for themselves. As of July 21st, that ban was overturned.

For our Get Together on August 11th, we’re going to look at the practice of circumcision. Our guest will be Norm Cohen, State Director of NOCIRC, the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers.

NOCIRC of Michigan is the state chapter of the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers. Founded in 1986, NOCIRC states that they are the center of expertise on circumcision. They are a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization of health care professionals and children’s health activists

Norm Cohen has been active in the anti-circumcision movement at the state, national, and international levels as the Director of NOCIRC of Michigan since its founding in 1994. He appeared in the 1996 documentary on male circumcision, “Whose Body, Whose Rights?”. He has spoken before many groups and been interviewed by local and national newspapers, radio, and television.

Come and join us for lively discussion, drinks, dinner and debate! This is a good event for Skeptics of Michigan to come together and discuss local, national, worldwide items affecting skeptics. All are welcome to listen and take part.

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A table of revelers at the Michigan Skeptics Second Birthday Party. Also you can see Lauren, the awesome waitress that has taken care of us for so many months now.

There are some times where you just have to sit back and smile.

My week had not started off too well. There was an endless chain of waiting in line and bureaucratic red tape that I had to spend several days to wade through just to get back to the beginning. By the end of it, (it is no where near finished) I was tired and really just wanted to either crawl into my bed or the nearest bottle.

But no! I can’t do that. We’re having our birthday party. Two years ago, we started the Michigan Skeptics Association in the hopes of creating a resource for skepticism and humanism in Michigan. Today we have a vibrant and diverse membership throughout the state and satellite groups starting in areas that cannot come to our monthly Get Togethers and events.

So I managed to shower off the last of the red tape and made my way to the birthday party. After all, I had the cake.

It’s been two years of hard work that we all put in together to make us what we are. A strong group of Skeptics and Rationalists working toward a goal of a fact based state. And as a group we are going to be more active in our communities. We will be there when anti-vaccination nuts try to convince people of their paranoia.

We’re going to go to school board and local government meetings where they try to dilute science and facts with drivel and we’re going to fight.

When we started this group, we pledged that we are politically neutral, and we’ve been true to that. We have members on all sides of the political spectrum. We can all agree, though, that fighting back against creationism and conspiracies in our schools and governments is an important matter that goes beyond left or right.

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Recently, we shared an article telling the story of a young woman’s escape from Scientology. After reading the article, my wife came across the beat poet Jamie DeWolf. DeWolf just happens to be the great grandson of L. Ron Hubbard himself, and he speaks out against Scientology when he can.

“Some people think I’m just coming out of the gate, the start of my anti-Scientology career,” he says. But it was more than a decade ago, in 2000, that he first dramatized his family background. Today, however, he has a hard time looking back at that performance, saying that it was “an incoherent mess.” He had a lot more to learn about his famous great-grandfather and about Scientology. He’s been apt pupil ever since. But he’s rarely talked openly about it. (He also had a different name then. Born Jamie Kennedy, he has taken his mother’s maiden name, DeWolf, to avoid confusion with another comic named Jamie Kennedy.)

“I think it’s funny when people think I’m trying to cash in on the Scientology aspect, because I’ve actually kept away from it a long time because of the hassle,” he says.

After that first performance, his mother was visited by a couple of men claiming to be poets who were interested in his material. She got them to admit they were Scientologists. They subsequently branded him an “anti-religious slam poet” in a flier.

He tries to keep his family out of his act. He did not want it consuming his life. He will only talk about it by request.

“I had a really difficult time. How could I put this into one monologue?” he says. There’s a lot about Hubbard and Scientology to talk about: “Anytime anyone asks me about it, I tell them, are you ready to sit down and listen to me for an hour? There’s so much to it.”

Maybe in the future there will be a full one man show about his family’s infamous past. He has enough to put it together and he plans on doing it, but that is for later. Jamie did, however, put together a monologue on his great grandfather for NPR’s Snap Judgment which became one of the most famous pieces to come out of the show and was the performance of the year.

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Isaac J. Harris is an atheist and skeptic blogger. He is an ex Jehovah’s Witness and has graciously agreed to write us a series guest posts about them. You can read more of Issac’s work at his site, The Atheist Geek News. If you would like to become a guest blogger, let us what you would like to say at our Contact Us page.

In the aftermath of several recent stories about Jehovah’s Witnesses, including the Candace Conti pedophilia court case and the DVD that launched the Sparlock Meme, I have been invited to do a series of articles about Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was a Witness myself for about six years and have been married to one for more than sixteen years. I am now a skeptical atheist with Witness in-laws (Everybody say it with me in their best Everybody Loves Raymond voice, “Thaaaat’s right!”) and very active in the ex-Jehovah’s Witness community.

Fair warning: so long as the Michigan Skeptics Association has articles about Jehovah’s Witnesses on its website, it’s very likely that Witnesses will come here and try to debunk any unflattering claims I make. It happens on ex-Witness sites across the web, and I doubt this site will escape their notice forever. Which brings me to the reason there are so many links on the page. By posting links to their own web site (and a few others) to support my claims, you will be able to see for yourselves that everything you read here is true.

And now, here are ten things you don’t know about Jehovah’s Witnesses.

10: Jehovah’s Witnesses Don’t Believe In The Trinity.

Jehovah’s Witnesses can be described as Arian, or at least Semi-Arian, in their view of God, Jesus, and holy spirit. But don’t panic: being Arian or Semi-Arian doesn’t have anything to do with the Nazis. That’s an entirely different sort of Arian.

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that the holy spirit is actually God’s “active force,” or energy, not a person as Trinitarians might see it. It’s also something that doesn’t get capitalized in their literature, which is why I’m not capitalizing it here.